The purpose of this study was to evaluate rubella susceptibility of pregnant women from central India as rubella infection can be devastating for the newborn if it occurs in the mother in the first trimester of pregnancy, which may lead to congenital rubella syndrome (CRS). There are very few studies about seroprevalence of rubella from India and none from central India. The study was conducted among women attending the obstetric department of a tertiary care hospital, in which 369 antenatal cases were tested for the presence of immunoglobulin G antibody for rubella and its titer...

Ethnicity, geography, and socioeconomic factors are among the aspects influencing the prevalence of uveitis in specific areas and countries. Human T-lymphotropic virus type 1-associated uveitis and ocular toxoplasmosis are endemic to Southern Kyushu, the southern-most region of Japan. Recent reports have postulated that the prevalence of intraocular tuberculosis is increasing in Tokyo. This review focuses on local factors that affect the three major vectors for infectious endemic uveitis in Japan, as well as their routes of transmission and factors for improving diagnoses...

Missing data is a common issue in community health and epidemiological studies. Direct removal of samples with missing data can lead to reduced sample size and information bias, which deteriorates the significance of the results. While data imputation methods are available to deal with missing data, they are limited in performance and could introduce noises into the dataset. Instead of data imputation, a novel method based on additive least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) is proposed in this paper for predictive modeling when the input features of the model contain missing data...

BACKGROUND: Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies of response inhibition in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) have used a visual Go/NoGo task to study the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure on response inhibition. No studies exist using auditory versions of the task; thus, it is unclear how the deficits observed in visual tasks translate into the auditory domain. METHODS: This study examined ERPs using an auditory Go/NoGo paradigm in a sample of 35 school-age children-18 with heavy prenatal alcohol exposure and 17 normally developing controls...

Cancer is increasingly responsible for the mortality gap between high and low socioeconomic position groups in high-income countries. This study investigates which cancers are contributing more to socioeconomic gaps in mortality and how this changes over time. New Zealand census data from 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001, and 2006, were linked to three to five years of subsequent mortality and cancer registrations, resulting in 54 and 42 million years of follow-up cancer incidence and mortality respectively. Age- and ethnicity-standardised cancer mortality rates and the slope index of inequality (SII) by income were calculated...

Induced abortion is associated with an overall increased risk of psychiatric morbidity, a low socioeconomic status, and other adverse conditions affecting well-being and quality of life. However, as stated by the American Psychological Association, induced abortion itself cannot be seen as a cause of mental health problems (3). The increased risk of psychiatric morbidity in women undergoing induced abortion can be noticed already before the abortion, as seen in a large registry based study in Denmark (4) as well as in our recent study concerning teenagers undergoing an induced abortion in Finland (5)...

The conceptual model of the life course considers that health-disease is a dynamic process that is also affected by previous and current lifelong experiences. The aim of the study was to investigate the incidence of caries and its determinants in young people in Sobral-Ceará, Brazil. This was a cohort study of oral health started in 2000, with waves in 2006 and 2012. 482 young people aged 17-21 years were examined and interviewed. The incidence of caries between 2006 and 2012 was the outcome analyzed and the independent variables were socioeconomic conditions and use of oral health actions and services...

The lack of epidemiological and environmental data on Brazilian indigenous populations is a challenge for the elaboration of public policy. This lack of data is more acute for "landless" indigenous groups. From this perspective, it was considered relevant to describe the Aranã, a landless indigenous group living in Minas Gerais, focusing on the demographic, socioeconomic and sanitary dimensions. A household survey was conducted. The data collected were analyzed and compared with those from other national ethnic groups...

Few studies have been conducted on truck drivers with regard to their health problems, especially their drug consumption profile. This study aimed to determine the continuous use of drugs and to identify use-related professional characteristics among this category. A cross-sectional study was carried out with truck drivers parked at the sorting yard of the, Port of Paranaguá, Paraná. An interview to obtain socioeconomic data, data on health problems, working conditions and continued use of medication was performed...

About 0.75 million neonates die every year in India, the highest for any country in the world. The neonatal mortality rate (NMR) declined from 52 per 1000 live births in 1990 to 28 per 1000 live births in 2013, but the rate of decline has been slow and lags behind that of infant and under-five child mortality rates. The slower decline has led to increasing contribution of neonatal mortality to infant and under-five mortality. Among neonatal deaths, the rate of decline in early neonatal mortality rate (ENMR) is much lower than that of late NMR...

This study aimed to (i) describe concurrent and simultaneous tobacco and cannabis use and (ii) investigate the association between cannabis use and motivation and intentions to quit tobacco in a sample of socioeconomically disadvantaged smokers. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 2013 and 2014 with current tobacco smokers receiving aid from two community service organizations in New South Wales, Australia. At least weekly cannabis use for the month prior to survey, motivation to quit tobacco and intentions to quit tobacco were measured in 369 participants (77% consent rate)...

BACKGROUND: As population lead levels decrease, the toxic effects of lead may be distributed to more sensitive populations, such as infants with poor fetal growth. OBJECTIVES: To determine the association of prenatal lead exposure and fetal growth; and to evaluate whether infants with poor fetal growth are more susceptible to lead toxicity than those with normal fetal growth. METHODS: We examined the association of second trimester maternal blood lead levels (BLL) with birthweight-for-gestational age (BWGA) z-score in 944 mother-infant participants of the PROGRESS cohort...

STUDY OBJECTIVES: The aim of the present paper is to investigate the determinants of sleeping patterns in children up to age 9 on a large and geographically homogeneous sample of British children and parents, focusing in particular on the role of economic and social factors, specifically on income. METHODS: The data of this study come from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a long-term health research project that recruited over 14,000 pregnant women who were due to give birth between April 1991 and December 1992 in Bristol and its surrounding areas, including some of Somerset and Gloucestershire...

Socioeconomic changes, as well as the development of new contraceptive modalities may influence women's preferences in the selection of a method of contraception. The aim of this study was to evaluate the knowledge, opinions and attitudes of female university students regarding the menstrual cycle, sexual health and contraception. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted among 2572 female university students in Hungary, Romania and Serbia, between November 2009 and January 2011. A higher proportion of students of health sciences than students of other faculties had appropriate knowledge of the fertile period within a menstrual cycle: 86...

Previous cross-sectional studies examining whether John Henryism (JH), or high-effort coping with socioeconomic adversity, potentiates the inverse association between socioeconomic position (SEP) and cardiovascular health have focused mainly on hypertension in African Americans. We conducted the first longitudinal test of this hypothesis on incident acute myocardial infarction (AMI) using data from the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study in Finland (N = 1405 men, 42-60 years). We hypothesized that the expected inverse gradient between SEP and AMI risk would be stronger for men scoring high on JH than for those scoring low...

BACKGROUND: The effectiveness of faecal immunochemical test (FIT)-based screening programs is highly dependent on consistent participation over multiple rounds. We evaluated adherence to FIT screening over four rounds and aimed to identify determinants of participation behaviour. METHODS: A total of 23 339 randomly selected asymptomatic persons aged 50-74 years were invited for biennial FIT-based colorectal cancer screening between 2006 and 2014. All were invited for every consecutive round, except for those who had moved out of the area, passed the upper age limit, or had tested positive in a previous screening round...

STUDY DESIGN: Descriptive cross-sectional study. OBJECTIVES: Pain is a prevalent complication of individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Our objective was to examine the association between social support, socioeconomic factors and psychosocial factors and pain to develop more effective management strategies. SETTING: Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Research (BASIR) Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. METHODS: The Persian version of the Brief Pain Inventory was used to measure the pain, and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support was used to measure social support through structured face-to-face interviews in SCI individuals...

Earth-observing remote sensing data, including aerial photography and satellite imagery, offer a snapshot of the world from which we can learn about the state of natural resources and the built environment. The components of energy systems that are visible from above can be automatically assessed with these remote sensing data when processed with machine learning methods. Here, we focus on the information gap in distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays, of which there is limited public data on solar PV deployments at small geographic scales...

BACKGROUND: In many countries, those with lower socioeconomic status are disproportionately affected by poor oral health. This can be attributed, at least in part, to differences in preventive dental visiting. While several theories have been applied to the area, they generally fail to capture the recursive nature of dental visiting behaviour, and fall short of informing the design of complex interventions to tackle inequalities. OBJECTIVE: To undertake a systematic review and synthesis of theory in order to provide an overview of the pathways which bring about socioeconomic inequalities in early dental visiting, and identify possible intervention points...